Locality and non-linear representations in tonal phonology

Department: University of Delaware, Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Publisher: University of Delaware

Date Issued: 2016

Abstract: This dissertation provides support for the hypothesis that surface well-formedness in phonological tone patterns is governed by language-specific, local constraints over autosegmental representations. The particular notion of locality invoked in this dissertation is that of banned substructure constraints, which are drawn from the theory of computation, formal language theory, and formal learning theory (McNaughton and Papert, 1971; García et al., 1990; Rogers et al., 2013). Essentially, any pattern describable with such constraints is local because the well-formedness of a structure with respect to the pattern is based entirely on its composite substructures of a fixed size. The primary novel contribution of the current work is to extend this notion of computational locality from strings to autosegmental structures by way of mathematical graph theory, and to develop a theory of tonal well-formedness based in banned substructure constraints over autosegmental representations. Through analyses of attested edge-based, quality-specific, and positional tone association patterns, as well as long-distance patterns, it is shown that such a theory can describe a range of major tonal generalizations, including ones beyond the power of both string-based local theories and standard explanations of tone in Optimality Theory. Furthermore, a local theory of constraints excludes unattested patterns requiring global evaluation that are predicted by other theories. Finally, it is discussed how banned substructure constraints can be connected to a restrictive theory of phonological input/output generalizations, and that there is a method for learning them. A secondary contribution of this dissertation is show that autosegmental representations are string-like in that they can be derived through the concatenation of graph primitives. Essentially, important properties of autosegmental representations can be seen as emerging from the concatenation of a finite alphabet of primitives, just as strings are built out of a finite alphabet of symbols. This novel approach to defining autosegmental representations not only makes the correct empirical prediction that languages cannot have unbounded ‘contouring’, it also allows for direct comparison of autosegmental grammars to string grammars. It is also shown how this notion of concatenation can be recruited for understanding input/output generalizations, and how it can be used to learn autosegmental grammars from string inputs.